Hilary is a professional journalist and novelist. She writes dark, disturbing fiction often involving a glamorous lifestyle that is rotten at the core. She delves into her characters’ psyches with the precision of a surgeon. Her debut novel, THE DAMAGE DONE, will be published on September 28, 2010 by Forge.

Her stories have appeared in A Twist of Noir, Spinetingler, Crimefactory, Needle, Thuglit, and Beat to a Pulp, among others. Her story “Insatiable” won the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story. She is also the author of 18 travel guidebooks for Frommer’s. Originally from Toronto, she has lived in New York since October 2001. Her articles have appeared in magazines in the U.S. and Canada, including, Canadian Living and Reader’s Digest. For more about her work, check out hilarydavidson.com and thedamagedone.net.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse. I showed her the Christian Lacroix room and the cellar.

She complimented me on the wine list and asked for a Chateau d’Yquem.

Naturally, I poured the drinks.

We talked about the criminal mind and Kafka, we talked about gender conditioning and a patriarchal legal system.
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Deep cruelty often lurks behind an ostentatious designer lifestyle in your stories. Do you think that the image people portray in their lives in terms of acquisitions and lifestyle is a mechanism to hide their motives and shadows?

I think that ostentatious consumerist lifestyle can serve as camouflage for all sorts of reptilian characters. What fascinates me is the distance between the image that a person projects on the surface and what’s really going on under his or her skin. To some extent, that distance exists in everyone, and it’s not inherently sinister. But in a villain, the distance is vast and creates a great deal of tension. I don’t think that the dark characters I write about would view themselves as villains, but they consciously try to manipulate others’ perceptions of them, and they use money and gifts to do that. To me, a great villain is a great seducer.
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If one considers that political influence relies on propaganda, parallels may be drawn between this and the verbal manipulation of a seducer. What does seduction mean to you within the differing perceptions of the sexes and their need for power, and do you think that a woman kills differently to a man?

The parallel between political propaganda and verbal manipulation is a strong one, because both are based on telling people what they want to hear. A great seducer knows what their mark wants, and what their weaknesses are. That’s true of both sexes. Mr. Kennett, the narrator of “Insatiable,” isn’t what you might think of as a seducer — he’s old and fat — but he knows his beautiful wife’s weaknesses and he is relentless in exploiting them. Desiree in “Fetish” looks like a classic noir seductress, but it’s not her beauty that she uses to manipulate her father, it’s his guilt. She gives him the chance to play the hero, and that’s something he can’t resist. Seduction is usually understood to be purely sexual, but its Latin root means to lead astray. Sex may be part of the seduction, but the real hook is psychological.

I’m fascinated by the psychology of murder, and the question of whether there are differences between why men and women kill. The Victorian idea of women having finer feelings than men has always bothered me. If you relegate half the population to the domestic sphere, you certainly reduce their opportunities to murder, but their violent, angry feelings just get channeled in other directions. I think that women are just as predatory and power-hungry as men. In an equal-opportunity world, men and women have the same basic reasons for killing: anger, jealousy, revenge. But many people are still shocked by women who kill. The Amy Bishop case is a perfect example. Bishop is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist who gunned down six of her colleagues at the University of Alabama after she was denied tenure. After her arrest, the police went through her background and discovered that she had committed other crimes, including killing her younger brother when she was 21. At the time, the brother’s death was ruled accidental, even though Bishop fired a shotgun at him. The fact that she went free, and that there was never a full investigation into her brother’s death, suggests to me that many people still can’t believe that a woman could be a cold-blooded killer.
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If the exploitation of a patriarchal judicial system by women is connected to the history of male fear of female sexuality, to what extent do you see mythology and religion as helping female killers get away with murder?

That’s a complicated question because, historically, when you think of women who’ve bucked the sexual norms of their societies, they’ve been punished very harshly. But the other side of the coin is that most societies are reluctant to view women — made weak by God and nature — as capable of murder. Women were supposed to be warm and nurturing, not calculating killers. If that’s your point of view, it’s almost unimaginable that a woman could choose to kill. You know that children’s rhyme about Lizzie Borden?

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one

Well, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murder by a jury, even though she didn’t even testify in her own defense. And she inherited quite a lot of money thanks to the murders.

There are two novels I love that take historical cases of women accused of murder and explore what might have happened. One is Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which tells the story of Grace Marks, a 16-year-old servant who was convicted of murdering her employer and his mistress. This happened in Markham, Ontario, just north of what’s now Toronto, in 1843. Marks was convicted and sentenced to death, but her sentence was commuted by a judge who just couldn’t believe that such a lovely girl could do such a horrible thing. Atwood does a brilliant job of portraying Marks as a sly manipulator while leaving open the question of what really happened at the scene.

The other novel is Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep, which is loosely based on Winnie Ruth Judd, the notorious “trunk murderess” convicted of killing a roommate in Arizona in 1931. The press labeled Judd “the Blonde Butcher,” and it’s clear that she was sleeping with a married man. Was she a murderer? That question will probably be open forever, but Abbott does a spectacular job of examining the available evidence and re-imagining what really happened at the crime scene.
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Virago Press brought out a lot of novels covering the theme of women killers in Victorian Britain getting away with murder because the patriarchal psyche had sentimentalised them as part of its own defence structure, and that was implicit within the judicial system, in other words, judges didn’t believe women were capable of killing.  ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ by Mary Braddon covers a lot of the same ground, well worth reading.

Name an experience that changed your life and influenced your writing.

Travel has changed my life and influenced my work more than anything else. I have a history of taking a trip and then doing something that saner people might consider impulsive. For example, I went to Thailand when I was on staff at a magazine in Toronto and came home determined to quit and become a freelance writer. But in terms of influencing my writing, a trip I took to Prague roughly four years ago had a huge impact. At the time, I was doing well as a freelance journalist, writing travel guidebooks for Frommer’s and articles for magazines. But I was bored, churning out formulaic books and articles that had a limited shelf life. I wanted to write fiction, but I’d started working on several different novels and tossed them aside after writing anywhere from four to ten chapters. I had ideas, but no commitment to finishing anything. I was hopeless at outlining, so I’d get to a point where I had no idea what was supposed to happen next. And I had a voice in my head that would say things like “Stop wasting your time. No one’s going to read that!”

Visiting Prague was interesting, because everywhere you go, there are reminders of Franz Kafka. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I loved being able to explore his city and hear strange stories about him, like how he was obsessed with the hands on the statue of St. Barbara on the Charles Bridge. But there was one thing I learned about Kafka that shocked me, which was that he’d asked a friend to destroy his unpublished work when he died. The only reason we have The Trial and The Castle is because his friend ignored his wishes. Apparently Kafka had a voice in his head that told him he was wasting his time, too. There was something almost inexpressibly sad about that to me. At the same time, it was inspiring that he’d heard that voice and continued writing fiction anyway. When I came home, it definitely made it easier to tell that voice to shut the hell up.
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Thankfully Max Brod chose to ignore his request. His lover, Dora Diamant, partially executed his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers.

In ‘The Trial’, Kafka foresaw the bureaucratic jungle we have inherited. To what extent do you think we are living in the era of the rise of the technocrats and do you believe this generates the kind of data paranoia that is fertile territory for noir writing?

That’s such an intriguing question, because we’re living in an era in which data about individuals is constantly being mined. In the US, your credit card company knows all sorts of details about you and is allowed to sell much of that information to other companies. If you live in a city, you’re used to cameras watching you when you’re on the street or on the subway. A few weeks after 9/11, the Patriot Act was passed in the US, allowing the government to collect information about people in ways that it hadn’t been able to before — not legally, anyway. People have also voluntarily handed over all kinds of personal information on sites like Facebook, and some of them have realized that those sites are using that information in ways they never expected. For a few years there, people had the idea that they could be anonymous online, but I think that illusion is dissipating.

Yet, while all of this information is being collected about people, there’s also a tremendous amount of identity fraud going on. To me, this is a kind of tragic gift: it’s bad for society, but great for a noir writer. Identity theft is viewed as a modern plague, but if you look at classic noir fiction, identity fraud has played a major role in some of the best books in the genre. Think of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters or Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place or Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely — all of those great novels hinge on stolen or faked identities. In a lot of noir fiction, identity is a fluid concept, because you’re never really sure of who or what you’re dealing with.

Because identity theft is an important issue in my novel, The Damage Done, I did a lot of research about it. What I really wanted to know was, how far could you realistically go in stealing another person’s identity? Partly, I was inspired by several friends and relatives who’ve been victims of identity fraud. What I found scared me, because US banks and stores and credit-card companies and other lenders aren’t doing much of anything to prevent fraud. They’ve done their cost-benefit analysis, and they’ve decided that it would be too expensive to prevent, so they just clean up the messes after they happen. I’ve read a lot of fraud reports that are almost comically ridiculous. There are people who look nothing like the person they’re impersonating, yet they still get away with using their photo IDs. When you read about the issue, it’s mind-boggling. But it’s certainly interesting territory to mine in fiction.
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You have travelled extensively and you write about food and nutrition. What does being a Canadian mean to you and to what extent do you think that there is a pathology of eating locked within the criminal psyche?

I’m a dual citizen of Canada and the US, but I grew up in Toronto. Canadians tend to be curious about the rest of the world and less curious about their own country… or maybe that’s just me. When I lived in Canada, I was interested in traveling only outside of its borders, and I went everywhere from Ireland to Italy and from Russia to Thailand.

After I moved to New York in October 2001, I became interested in seeing Canada, too, and I visited places like Newfoundland and New Brunswick and British Columbia for the first time.

My favorite definition of what it means to be Canadian is from Pierre Berton, who said, “A true Canadian is one who can make love in a canoe without tipping.” If that’s true, there aren’t many true Canadians. I have my own definition, based on an exchange I had recently with Jedidiah Ayres. Jed writes and reviews crime fiction, and he did a “Ransom Notes” column for Barnes & Noble about Canadian crime fiction. He said great things about the very talented John McFetridge, but he couldn’t think of any other criminally minded Canadian authors. I sent him a bunch of names, then discovered that Sandra Ruttan, who’s also Canadian, did the same thing. It’s a long list — Sean Chercover, Rick Mofina, Linda L. Richards, Linwood Barclay, just to scratch the surface — but the funny thing was that we felt compelled to send names. A true Canadian takes pleasure in pointing out other Canadians. We may be polite, but we’re proud.

I’ve written so much about travel and food in guidebooks and articles, and some of that carries over into my fiction. Travel has in a big way. I’m working on my second novel right now, and it’s set in Peru, which I’ve written about before in short stories. Food is interesting to write about because it can be connected to a host of emotional and psychological issues. My first published story, “Anniversary” in Thuglit, features a man who is making dinner for the woman he loves. A brief excerpt:

“He had always loved cooking for the discipline and precision it demanded, but tonight he was too unsettled to take pleasure from it. He threw the two lobsters into the pot, put the lid on, and immediately felt guilty. When he cooked a lobster he normally took the time to hypnotize it first, a trick he’d learned from his father. They like the hot water, his father had told him. He was old enough to know that wasn’t actually true, but he held on to the custom of rubbing the space between their antennae to lull them into accepting their fate. There was no sense in being unnecessarily cruel, not to an animal, anyway.”

That gives you kind of a snapshot into the psychology of the character. At least, I hope it does. Using food in this way is a kind of shorthand.
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Have you ever known someone as pathological as one of your killers?

Several of my darker characters are loosely based on people I’ve met. I should explain that I don’t usually write about serial killers or gangsters or people who need to be violent in their line of work. I don’t know anyone like that. The dark characters I write about seem, at first glance, to be normal people — they have homes and jobs and, often, families. But there’s something off about them. They might be obsessive or narcissistic or controlling or immature. They are not inherently evil, but under certain circumstances, they’re capable of impulsively doing evil.

I mentioned earlier that I’m intrigued by the difference between the surface of a person, and what goes on underneath. I think if those two things diverge too much, that brings a person to their breaking point, and what’s bubbling under the surface boils over and cracks the veneer. Tom in “Good Bones,” which Crimefactory published, would be a perfect example. He’s a nice enough guy on the surface, but there’s so much rage and bitterness underneath, and when his life falls apart, he discovers what he’s truly capable of.

The one trait that the sociopaths I’ve met in real life have in common is that they feel sorry for themselves. It doesn’t matter what they do, they can manage to justify their behavior in their own minds and feel wronged by others at the same time. I always think about this when I’m writing a villain. I work out how they justify their own actions to themselves. One of the most horrible, irredeemable characters I’ve ever written is Mr. Kennett in “Insatiable,” and he spends the entire story feeling sorry for himself. The worst villains see themselves as victims.
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Much of what we have talked about has to do with the pathology of power. To what extent do you think the sexes need different kinds of power and do you agree with Jonathan Swift’s observation that men are grateful to the degree they are vengeful?

I don’t think that the power men and women strive for has ever really been different — but in the past they used radically different means to get power, and that was a fact born out of necessity. Swift is another writer I love, and I agree with his comment, harsh as it may seem. Gratitude is something that we tend to think of as a positive feeling, but there’s this bit of poison in it, too. When a person is deeply in another’s debt, it can create resentment that festers into a desire for revenge. That dynamic is so intriguingly twisted, and it’s something I write about in The Damage Done. The book’s main character, Lily, and her sister, Claudia, have had a rough start in life — their father died when they were young, and their mother was an alcoholic and an abuser. But Lily has grown up to be a successful writer, while Claudia is a drug addict and petty criminal. Lily’s attempts at taking care of her sister have led to a situation where Claudia depends on her yet loathes her. As a writer, it was rich territory to explore, but there’s also something absolutely heartbreaking about it.
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How would you like to be perceived as a writer?

I feel like I have two distinct identities as a writer, at least at the moment. On the one hand, I’m still working in journalism, and I have an earnest desire to write things that will help people. That’s why I set up a website called the Gluten-Free Guidebook in March 2008. I want people to eat well, and travel well. I want people who read my journalism to trust me.

With my fiction, I’m being provocative, and I hope I’m being entertaining. When Steve Weddle read “The Black Widow Club” — it’s in the first issue of Needle, the magazine he created — he wrote me a note about how much he enjoyed it, but said he would never, ever let me buy him a drink. Given what happens in that story, I can’t blame him. When people see my name on a story or a book, I want them to know they’re in for a hell of a ride.
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What’s the best piece of advice anyone has given you about writing?

When I came back from that trip to Prague, I went to a six-hour book-publishing workshop the next day. I hadn’t planned to attend because I figured I’d be jet-lagged, but I decided at the last minute to do it and, luckily for me, there was one slot open. The instructor, Susan Shapiro, had written a memoir about drug addiction called Lighting Up, and I’d loved the book. She was an amazing instructor, and my favorite thing that she said was “Write about your obsessions.” She made me think about what my obsessions really are, aside from books: psychology, travel, film noir, graveyards, Gothic anything, vintage. Then she made me think about how to use them in my writing. That was something I’d struggled with in journalism — I was writing what my clients wanted, and I’d sneak in references to the things that really interested me. With fiction, it’s the other way around. The funny thing is that so many other people share my obsessions. With travel or film noir, that’s easy to understand, but graveyards? That’s been a very happy surprise.
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Thank you for giving an incisive and profound interview Hilary. I look forward to reading ‘The Damage Done.’

Steve Weddle’s name is well known to anyone interested in noir writing.

Needle magazine is at the top of the tree in terms of quality and vision and Steve’s Channel Noir is a must see if you like crime writing in any shape or form.

Steve, a former English professor, graduated with an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. He now works for a newspaper group in Virginia and writes fiction.

He gave me a fascinating interview, in which we talked poetry, crime, politics and noir.

Check out at SteveWeddle.com, NeedleMag.com, and DoSomeDamage.com for his full repertoire.
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How did you come up with the idea for Needle Magazine?

One weeknight I was sitting on the couch reading Crimespree Magazine. Of course I loved the reviews and interviews and all the news in there, but I wanted more fiction. Same thing with Mystery Scene Magazine. Most of the short fiction I was reading was online. Plots with Guns. Crimefactory. Beat To A Pulp. Twist of Noir. Pulp Pusher. Thug Lit. Thrilling Detective. Authors’ sites. And on an on.

To me, there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect. You could read about the writers in print, but you couldn’t read them in print. Not most of the folks I was reading, anyway.

And then there are the online flash challenges. A thousand words online. Hop from one site to another, reading along a theme, discovering authors I’d never heard of. Great stuff.

All of that just pissed me off. So much great stuff out there and it’s all over the web, but I can’t sit by my library window, fold it in my hand, and read it. I can’t take the stories out on the back deck and read them.

This year I turn 40. I’m not ancient. And I have a decent understanding of this world web the kids are talking about. But I like to have a collection in my hand, ink on paper, where I can read stuff and bookmark stuff and underline stuff and pass it off to a friend and say “read this.” Something I can enjoy at the lunch table. Unroll at the soccer game. And I wanted more people to read all these cool authors I’ve been reading. I wanted to put some of these great writers together, to make sure as many people as possible could see how great they are. You can get lost on the internet, you know? Hopping around from site to site. You bet there’s some great stuff out there, but I wanted an ink-on-paper alternative. As much as I love online crime fiction sites, I wanted a collection offline as another outlet.

So I mentioned that on Twitter and people much more talented and smarter than I am said they thought it was a great idea. So I asked some smart people to help, and they did. John Hornor Jacobs brought the artist vision to the thing. We chatted a few times and I told him what I had in mind. We seemed to be in agreement on most things. Then he’d send me some pages, some design. Unbelievably rich stuff. Sure the dude can write, but the eye he has for the look of the journal was just great. And Naomi Johnson and Scott D. Parker were phenomenal in reading the stories and making some suggestions here and there. And Dan O’Shea came in at the tail end and helped work out some kinks.

That’s the inside stuff. On the outside, of course, I asked some talented people to join in on this idea and send in some stories, and they did. In many respects, this was like a bunch of us getting together and just jamming out some tunes. And yet, each person’s own talents — drum solo, Van Halen riffs on the guitar, banshee wails into a reverb mic — ended up turning the show into such a fantastic concert. I was just really pleased with the way the journal turned out. But not just that. The people coming together to produce something — something literary and something lasting — was just so fantastic. From the feedback we’ve gotten, I can tell people were blown away by the stories, which is what it’s all about.
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You graduated with an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University, which poets do you admire and why?

Kenneth Koch. Gregory Corso. Anne Sexton. Chad Rohrbacher. Richard Hugo.

“Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/traveling-through-the-dark/) is amazing.

My favorite book of poems is The Never-Ending by Andrew Hudgins. He has a couple of great ones in there. One is called “Praying Drunk” and one is “Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought.”

He has this style, this persona in these that can be deceptive. Kind of an old country guy, a drunk with a history who catches glimpses of that blinding light in the soul of the universe. He also has a poem called “Something Wakes Me Up” about his neighbors who are sawing apart a deer while he listens like a coward.

A poet named Laura Kasischke wrote one in Poetry magazine back in the late 80s. Maybe early 90s. The piece was about cheating on your spouse and thinking about what color to paint the upstairs bathroom. I’ve never read anything else by her, which is a failing of mine, not hers. But this poem has stuck with me. The poem is called “Palm.” (http://compost-hedgie.blogspot.com/2007/03/laura-kasischke-again-wild-brides.html) There’s this line in it that still, I don’t know. Seems stupid to say it “gives me chills.” But I read it and I get kinda shaky for a second and the hairs on my arms stand up. So whatever that is. I’m sure Hudgins or Kasischke would say it with cleverness. It isn’t about cheating on your spouse. It’s about wanting more. Thinking that there has to be more to your life. To life itself. The reader of her palm works through the woman’s life, how the mundane is punctuated with glimpses of blinding light. More than just simple journeys of family vacations. Here’s the line: “this is how the small survive, the way the small have always survived.” You gotta read the poem. I can’t do it justice. I’m like that guy from Star Trek doing the TV commercial saying how your TV can’t show how awesome this new HD TV he’s selling is because your own TV is crap. Well, I can’t explain how cool Kasischke, Stafford, and Hudgins are. I can point you in their directions, though. That’s the best I can do. Maybe it’s enough.
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Do you think it is possible to write crime poetry?

Yeah, I can’t see why not. Once we had that meeting and decided this poem stuff didn’t have to rhyme, what the heck, right? Besides, the whole idea that Emily Dickinson is still taught in schools is pretty criminal, isn’t it? So why not crime poetry? From a certain angle, Sylvia Plath’s ARIEL is a book of crime poems, isn’t it?

I think what you want to do with a “crime poem” is the same as with any other poem. Get to that flash you can’t find in prose, some sort of understanding.

Dogrel about a bank heist, um, no thanks. But why can’t you address the human condition with a crime poem as well as with a love poem?

Crime poetry isn’t new. And it wasn’t new when John Milton took a shot at it, either.

Hmmm. Now I want to teach a seminar in the history of crime poetry.
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William Blake said that all poets are ‘of the Devil’s Party’ referring to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. James Lee Burke writes dark Gothic prose that goes into the internal lives of his characters in some depth, do you think that the popularity of crime writing stems from a desire to witness the extreme darkness within the human psyche? 

I think the best crime writing comes from the ability to tell an engaging story involving people you care about. And conflict makes the story, moves the story along. Conflict adds friction. Interest. Motivation. You have to have something at stake. Sometimes that involves a victim staked-out in an ant-infested warehouse. Sometimes it’s crooked cops on a stakeout. Sometimes you’re on your way for a steak dinner and you get mugged. Hmm. Maybe that was too many “at stake” jokes. Fine. And I didn’t even get to the vampire crime fiction jokes.

With the idea that you need something at stake, the dark part of the human psyche is present, of course. The physical threat is important — do this or you’re dead — but I’ve heard people say that all crime writing is wish-fulfillment. You know, the people at work are mean to you. You don’t much care for your family. So you read or write about some tough character, someone who would give that mean jerk on the fifth floor what-for. Someone who wouldn’t put up with that crap. I guess there can be some of that in there. You want to read about people who are better than you. More exciting than you. But I think that’s a limited way of looking at things.

Part of the appeal of crime fiction, especially the darker stuff, is to have a neat, little container in which to hold your fears. People like to be scared. Makes them feel alive. We all know this. We talk about it at our “Understanding People for Crime Writers” meetings each Tuesday night at 8.

But people don’t like to be scared, um, in real life. Is that how to put it? I mean, it’s cool and exciting to read about some dude breaking into another dude’s house and tying him up and torturing him to find out where the blackmail photos are hidden. All cool until one night around midnight you hear glass break downstairs in the storage room, a high-pitched shatter on the concrete floor.

We like seeing horror on the evening news (kids, ask your grandparents) every night, but we don’t want it to be too close. And we like to have reasonable violence, as well as contained violence. That’s why crime fiction is such a comfort. Sure, the guy was tortured for the photos, but I don’t have photos, so I won’t be tortured. I’m safe. Kinda like when we hear about someone we know killed herself last week. We want to know why. We want to find a reason that it won’t happen to us. We press and press until we find out the girl was on drugs. Phew. We’re safe. We don’t do the drugs. This can’t happen to us. We can just turn the channel to another news show. Pick up another book about someone almost us, but not quite.

Violence at a distance. We slow down when we pass the three-car wreck on the highway. But we don’t stop.
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One of the prevalent themes of crime writing is revenge. Do you think it’s true to say that revenge is lawless justice and if so what does the frequency of its occurrence say about the legal system we have imposed on the chaos we inhabit? 

I’m not sure revenge is necessarily either lawless or justice. Revenge is taking action for a wrong. Maybe it’s a punishment. Life in prison can be revenge for murder in that sense. I guess one of the true statements we can make is to say that revenge is, by nature, reactionary. First you have the wrong — perceived or real. Then you have the reaction meant to settle the score — the revenge.

For crime fiction, this takes a conflict and lays out a series of events that must follow. One of the ways in which this can be made exciting is to move the story, the action, outside of the normal path. Cops spend a good deal of time with paperwork. Not so exciting. Before the accused gets to sentencing at the circuit court level, he or she has gone through, and I’m estimating here, probably 482 earlier court appearances. Sure, sometimes this is sexy. More often, it’s rather nap-inducing.

Man kills man. Cops arrest man. Man goes to trial, then prison. Blah. What if the man escapes the cops? What if he takes a family hostage? What if the narrator is one of those people taken hostage? The way the legal system “usually” helps us sleep at night. But those stories don’t keep us up at night, turning from chapter to chapter until we wake up in the morning with the book on the floor.

I’m sure someone smarter than I am could say something clever about how our “frontier” mentality in America informs the content of our fiction. How at some base-level, we all have to create our own order for the world, our own way of dealing with the chaos that surrounds us, that threatens to rips us all apart.

The idea of “lawless justice,” I think, goes back to what I was saying about the contained violence — ordered chaos, if you want. Brutal horrors lined up in alpha-order on library shelves. Yes, we want justice for wrongs that are done. And we like that justice a little messy. Not, of course, too messy.
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Do you think that one of the functions of a narrative structure is to impose order on chaos?

You know those late 50s pieces from Coltrane, when he was working with Red Garland and Miles Davis? Before free jazz ruined the world, I mean. Even up to the mid 60s. You’d have a standard and you’d set up the, let’s see, maybe you’d call it a leit motif? The phrase throughout. Something to hold on to. Then the soloist would take off with scales and chords and you’d never know where the heck he’d end up. Then all of a sudden all those pieces start falling right back in and the song is brought around to the standard again. That’s the kind of jazz I like.

I don’t want just a series of notes following along the sheet music, some formulaic path from beginning to end. And I don’t want idiotic honking not tied to any damn thing. I like to have some understanding of what the expectations are when I start. Then take that and go with it.

This is why I like authors who can start with a conventional idea and then take it into new territory. Brad Parks with his reporter novels. Sean Chercover and his PI work. Joelle Charbonneau and her roller rink murder mystery. You get the set-up — the order — and then you can contain that chaos. Otherwise all you’ve got is a mess.

You know that phrase “Expect the unexpected”? I’m sure there are dumber phrases out there, but I can’t think of any right now. Once you expect it, it ain’t so unexpected, right? So I like to have my expectations set early on, whether it be Coltrane’s “Favorite Things” or Hilary Davidson’s short stories. Then I like to have everything break nasty.
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Experimental fiction rejects a linear plot in favour of something more random, more evocative of the way the subconscious works, while traditionally crime fiction has followed the sequential route. Do you think it’s possible to write an experimental crime novel?

The poet Richard Hugo was teaching a creative writing class, listening to kids read their work. One of the students was reading his own composition with the line “I want to hold you forever.”

“Hold her forever?” Hugo asked. The kid said, yeah. Forever. Hugo laughed and asked, “What’re you gonna do when you gotta take a leak?”

That’s my favorite line from a poetry class. I only read about that one.

My second favorite line I got in person and this one actually has something to do with what we’re discussing.

One of my classmates at LSU was taking some crap for a poem he’d written. “I was just trying something. You know. An experiment.”

Professor Dave Smith wasn’t happy. “No such thing as an experiment like that. If it works, it’s a poem. Doesn’t work, it’s a failure.”

My favorite reading experience was when a half-dozen of us at LSU worked through FINNEGANS WAKE. We studied Irish history, watched documentaries, read many other Irish novels. We dug through economic theory from Italy. Church rules for Catholics. (I don’t think they call them rules.) All to better understand this “experimental” fiction Joyce had written. What an amazing book that is. Is it crime fiction? Eh, kinda, sorta. You can do things in there that you couldn’t pull off in anything more “traditional.” When finding “HCE” hidden in a section of drunken hiccups can bring a roomful of 20-somethings to hysterical tears, you know this isn’t a normal book.

I think the idea that anyone can write a book showcasing the way the subconscious works is a bit of a lark, anyway. Really a particle-wave sort of problem, isn’t it? How can you use your conscious brain to write a subconscious story. You’d write a story in the way your conscious brain tells you that your subconscious brain works. You can’t be both at once. You can have a bit of both, but can’t really exist as one and the other. Your conscious brain can’t adequately do the subconscious bit.

Crime fiction inherently follows a causal pattern. The thing before the crime. Then the crime. Then the thing after the crime. (Let me know if I’m being too technical.)

Could you break this apart, as they did in the movie MEMENTO, to come up with something new? Someone probably has. Experiments in crime fiction happen all the time. Time shifts. Unreliable narrators. Points of view. I can’t think of a Faulkner novel that wasn’t crime fiction.

The problem with the subconscious is that it isn’t altogether rewarding, is it? We get glimpses of cleverness, but the payoff just isn’t there. Kinda like a third-rate comedian. Some funny jokes here and there, but not that big one at the end that brings it all back together. You get those minor connections, as in a dream, but no way to hold it together. “There was this horse there who turned into my Uncle Rocky, I guess because of the Italian Stallion, and then he said something that I thought was great and I thought I should write it down when I wake up but then I wrote it down on the horse’s saddle which I guess the horse had come back and I thought I was awake when I did that and then I looked down and I stepped in horsecrap and that’s when I woke up too late to let the puppy out.”

Dreams. Comedy. Jazz. Crime writing. You gotta have something to hold things together. But not too tight. And not all the time. You gotta take a leak every once and a while.
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Do you think in terms of crime writing it’s more interesting to read a whydunnit than a whodunnit?

I just finished reading a good book by Michael Connelly. This one involves a cold case that’s brought up again for such-and-such a reason. So you’re expecting there to be more to the crime than you think. Well, there’s another crime related to that one. Then maybe it isn’t. Then maybe the whole reason of why it was brought up again is more important than the crime itself. In books such as that one, you just grab hold of the main guy and hope you can follow along. But in these types of books, you’re reading them because of the main character. These mysteries that have 15 books in the series. Whether it’s Laura Lippman or Reed Farrel Coleman, you’re not reading a whydunnit or a whodunnit when you pick up one in the series. You’re reading a whodunsolvedit.

Readers will go along with you in book three when your guy is chasing down a serial killer. And in book eight when he’s after a group of terrorists. Book eleven when someone is threatening an elementary school with low-grade beef. They follow along because of the character in these.

Then you have stand-alones in which the back of the book sells you. One of those where this, that, and the other is at stake and there’s a ticking clock in the background. She has to find the dirty nuke at hidden at the county fair before the fat lady sings. All without waking her senile grandmother, whom she brought along in a wheelchair for some fresh air before getting caught up in all of this. But what if she finds the nuke on page 25 but doesn’t know who or why. Or she knows the who because he was blown up just as she discovered the location of the bomb. But why was her husband planting the bomb?

I guess the wheredunnit wouldn’t work any more than the howdunnit or whendunnit. “Why” and “who” it is, then.

There’s a good book I read last year called TRUST NO ONE by Gregg Hurwitz. Bad guy going to blow things up. Then the cops kill him. The “who” in the whodunnit shifts because the crime itself has moved. The why moves along at a crisp pace.

If you set it up from the criminal’s point of view, have her kill some folks, then die in a shoot-out with the cops by page 10, I think you could have a pretty good start to a whydunnit. I would think something like this would be just as clue-driven as the typical whodunnit, but you’d need a good deal of psychobabble throughout, um, I mean insight into the killer’s personality to pull that off. Maybe by page 150 you think that the cop who killed her wasn’t as clean as you thought. Maybe he killed her to cover up something.

Whether the book is a standard whydunnit or whodunnit, it seems to me the best books are those that bring in both aspects.
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Picking up on what you just said, do you think Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime And Punishment’ was one of the first great crime novels?

Kate Horsley and crew have done some great work at http://www.crimeculture.com in setting up some historical context for how crime fiction came about.

If someone wanted to claim that C&P was the first great crime novel, I’d be OK with that. Keep in mind, though, that it was first read in a magazine, much like the Sherlock Holmes stories that started a couple of decades or so later. And that’s not to mention Poe’s work back in the 40s.

And there was a book by a Danish guy in the early 1800s based on a two-hundred-year old crime. I think that one is considered a “true crime novel,” though. Can’t think of the guy’s name. (Thanks, Google. The books is The Rector of Veilbye by Steen Steensen Blicher. YES. THAT Steen Steensen Blicher.)

As for the crime novel, though, Dostoyevsky would be right there. Drunks, deadbeats, detectives, murder, and political ideology. What more could you want?

Beyond a doubt the biggest crime is that Dostoyevsky didn’t turn this into a series of novels. Maybe Raskolnikov and Sonya leave Siberia, adopt a cute little Persian kitty with some vague psychic powers and travel around the world solving crimes. Heck, he could have taken some minor characters and spun off some Young Adult novellas from it. Then people would remember his name. Dostoyevsky. Geez, what an idiot. Not THE Idiot, of course. That would be Myshkin.
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Prior to 9/11, which exposed the vulnerabilities of air space and ushered in a new age of terrorism, the national boundaries of the US had been invaded militarily only once: by Pancho Villa and forces from the Mexican revolution. There is a persistent theme in American literature of the fear of invasion, be it from insurrection from within to fears of the Mafia, FBI, or CIA: do you think that this theme plays a part in crime writing? 

Part of that is the basic “fear of the other,” don’t you think? As the scientists will tell you, we wear our New Orleans Saints jerseys to identify with our tribe. When we see someone at the game wearing an Atlanta Falcons jersey, we know he’s “one of them.” As humans, we’re all quite generous in our prejudices. We can hate anyone who is different — and fear is part of that hate. Whether ifrom the color of the skin or the colors of the flag, our “fear of invasion” as you put it, is a strong motivator in our lives and our fiction.

Whether it’s Pancho Villa coming into New Mexico or the government sneaking in to take away my closet of guns, fear makes a good motivator. Imagine “the other” making you powerless. Now that’s good stuff for crime fiction. Michelle Gagnon has a book out called THE GATEKEEPER about a charismatic guy who brings many of these various hate groups together. These groups fear so many things that it’s easy to get them riled up. That can be a powerful force in fiction as well as in popular culture. From the readers’ perspective, these groups become one more “other” to deal with. And each of these groups has individuals with their own stories to tell.

This type of crime fiction shares much of its punch with horror fiction, I think. The fear of something creepy and dangerous under the bed. Monsters. Terrorists. Serial killers. Government spies. Whatever it is, it’s enough to scare you. To take you out of your comfort zone and smack you around a bit.

“Fear of invasion” is, in one sense, a fear of having the status quo altered. A change to your comfort. You’d mentioned earlier about revenge. Much the same, don’t you think? For Panco Villa, the assault onto American soil was revenge for some bad guns he’d gotten. President Wilson sends forces after him, but can’t catch him. Later, President Wilson sends forces into Mexico to stop the Germans from selling guns to one of the Mexican sides. Someone does something, changing a comfort level, then the other side has to seek “revenge” in order to restore the balance — bring order to the chaos, as it were.

And that’s what much of crime fiction is all about — restoring order or creating a new order. Changing the way things are or changing things back to the way they were. Good people do well, while the bad people go to jail. Of course, what happens when the shiny people are filthy, evil bastards bent on keeping everything set to their own order? When the order isn’t all it’s supposed to be? What happens when the best person out there — the person who can set things right — is just back from two years in jail, fighting an addiction to pain killers, and trying to prove that the cop who killed his brother is a crooked son of bitch? What happens when you need an invasion from that rebel, that guy you fear, that “other,” in order to break things apart and create a new order? Well, then you don’t just have crime fiction. Then you’ve got noir.
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You certainly do. Thank you for your time Steve, this has been a deep dig into noir and the way literature provides a map of our experience. Noir’s ongoing fascination and power stems from its exploration of characters who are on the edge, living in a twilight zone. It depicts men and women who are not morally upright or heroic, but flawed, desperate individuals caught up in something sinister. Because of this I think its pull stems from the fact that it shows none of us are faced with simple black and white choices. It deals with that world of the irrational that drives so much of our lives.

If you read any of Jason Duke’s stories at A Twist Of Noir they grab you from the word go.

They have a real, vivid quality that is there in the dialogue and the prose which is like freshly cut glass.

Jason is a Sergeant in the U.S. Army and served 15 months in Iraq as part of OIF 07-09. He also has a BA in Public Relations, which I guess makes him a man who can talk you down before snapping your neck. His stories have also appeared in an array of magazines such as Thuglit, Plots With Guns, Spinetingler Magazine, Pulp Pusher, Flash Fiction Offensive, and his screenplays have earned a special mention in the 2002 American Gem Short Script Contest. He was placed as a finalist in the 2003 Anything But Hollywood Contest.

He has also written a serialised novella, ‘Phoenix Life’. You may want to look out for it on crimewav.com soon. The trailer to it puts it at the top of your reading list. Check it out here.

Jason walks the walk.

He kindly agreed to let me interview him and boy was it worth it.

I arrived in the sweltering heat of a June day in Arizona and moved through the haze to the Iron Horse biker bar where we’d agreed to meet.

Jason was amicable and focused and so I began the interview.
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How has your active military service influenced your crime writing?

It’s had a profound influence.

I say ‘fuck’ and ‘prick’ and ‘cock sucker’ a lot more now than when I was a civilian, plus a bunch of other choice words, but those are the ones I toss out there liberally the most. As in, some prick pisses me off, and I call him a fucking cock sucker right before I put him in a rear naked choke.

My 15 months in Iraq is probably what influenced my crime writing the most.  I served in Iraq from December 2007 to February 2009. I wrote two breakthrough stories in 2008, “Soldier Boy” for Plots With Guns, and “Running to Zero” for Thuglit.

“Soldier Boy” has a clear military theme. I wrote it shortly after I got to Iraq and started noticing the true scope of how things were over there. The news showed you all the bad shit, which was pretty accurate because the place was a shithole, just the frequency that all the bad shit happened wasn’t accurate. The time I was there, I couldn’t see anything good coming out of Iraq, didn’t want to see. I hated being there and everything about it, which I think is pretty evident in Soldier Boy.
I wrote “Running to Zero” toward the end of 2008. The story has no military theme, but the influence was there. I’m of the Gen X generation. A lot of the soldiers in the Army fall into the Gen Y generation. I dealt with them on a daily basis; we depended on each other. But at the same time, these were also the same young self-entitled twenty-something pricks.

I was reading Chuck Palahniuk at the time and brushing up on existentialists such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, so I started writing about a self-entitled Gen Y kid that blames everyone else for his problems, culminating in his mental breakdown. I was nearly 12 months into my deployment, and by this point had reached a kind of mental breakdown of my own and was like fuck it, fuck them, fuck the world. Like the kid in the story, I realized I was blaming other people, blaming them for my choice to join the Army that led me to Iraq. So I guess writing the story was my way of working things out.

So far, I’ve written only two stories with clear military themes. The second one, “Last Days to Nowhere,” should be coming out in Pulp Metal Magazine soon. I also incorporate military elements into most of my stories, such as “Lie Down With Dogs” at A Twist of Noir or “Bloody Sunday” at Flash Fiction Offensive.
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Most crime writers have never killed anyone, when you read descriptions of killings in fiction how real do they seem to you?

Fortunately, I’ve never had to kill anyone either.

Most of the attacks we dealt with in Iraq were IEDs and snipers. There was one major firefight where we actually had targets to shoot at, the spring 2008 siege of Sadr City against the Muqtada al-Sadr Mahdi Army, but I wasn’t there. I’ve seen plenty of the aftermath, as well as live footage from UAV’s or Apaches.

None of the footage was very exciting, or visceral. They just fall down, or if they get blown up, there’s a flash and big cloud of dirt. There’s no blood bursting from the bodies, no bodies or body parts flying through the air. Up close maybe it’s a different matter, but it all happens so fast that you don’t fully register it. You only see the aftermath, then try to fill in the rest.

For me, the aftermath was very visceral, wherein the true horrors lie.

That would be perhaps a realistic depiction of what happens, but not very exciting, especially in fiction.
So I’ve noticed a trend in crime writing that kind of mimics the movies insofar as the death scenes are depicted, where you do have the blood bursting from the bodies, and the body parts flying everywhere. Yet there are levels and degrees, in which you have some writers that go way over the top in their depictions, some not so much.

Also, writers write from an outsider’s perspective; they’re not living it in the moment. As a result, we’re forced to imagine what someone’s brains blowing out the back of their head would look like. I think because most crime writers haven’t killed someone or witnessed someone get killed firsthand, they’re left with what they see in the news, on television, in the movies, in pictures, etc. I think there’s always an attempt made for some degree of authenticity in these depictions, but limited owing to the sources most crime writers derive as a basis for what they believe happens when someone gets killed.

I guess then, for me, not very real; however, a hell of a lot less boring. If the reader thinks it’s real, and there’s that suspension of disbelief, then the writer has done his/her job.
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Which crime writers do you like and why?   

I like them all. There are no writers I dislike.

I think all writers and the stories they tell have inherent value.

Not to imply they are all necessarily good. I’m as much a hypocrite as the next person and will talk shit about a story if I think it’s bad, but regardless I still give every writer props for telling their stories and sharing them. It’s all gravy. I think the good stories will come to the forefront and it all works itself out in the end.  Notice I say story telling. I prefer to sum it all up into that process because that’s the end result. The writing and everything that goes into it is all part of that process.

But I suppose everyone has preferences, and I’m no exception.

I prefer writers who write their stories in a contemporary setting as opposed to writers whose stories take place in the past. That doesn’t mean I won’t support those writers, or dislike their stories. I was fortunate enough to make a Megan Abbot book signing for “Bury Me Deep” and really dig the novel. Same goes for Eric Beetner’s “One Too Many Blows to the Head” or Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel series. I just prefer contemporary settings.

I have a taste for depraved, twisted shit. Unlikeable, unredeemable characters; blood, violence, lots of action; sex and profanity. But also stories with a message, that make me feel something, get me thinking afterward about this thing we call the human condition.

Some of the authors I like include Anthony Neil Smith, Seth Harwood, Scott Phillips, B.R. Stateham, Charlie Williams, Kyle Minor, Reed Farrel Coleman, John McFetridge, Nick Quantrill, Dave Zeltserman, Ken Bruen, the list goes on. Three up and coming authors I think everyone should keep an eye out for are Hilary Davidson, Frankie Bill, and Greg Bardsley. Some of the writers I read in the various online ezines include Keith Rawson, Jimmy Callaway, Chad Eagleton, Christopher Grant, Daniel B. O’Shea, Josh Converse, Joyce Juzwik, Steve Weddle, Patti Abbott, Paul Brazill, the list goes on. And this bloke named Richard Godwin.

So, even though I have my preferences, and pimped a handful of names, it’s all gravy, I like it all.
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Your screenplays have earned a special mention in the American Gem Short Script Contest and you have been placed as a finalist in the 2003 Anything But Hollywood Contest. You write excellent fast-paced fiction with first rate dialogue, do you see yourself writing more filmscripts? 

I do, but my screenwriting has taken a back seat right now. My last attempt was entering the 2009 American Gem Short Script Contest. I made it past the first round picks, but that was it. Screenwriting is a tough business to break into. Two ways to get your foot in the door are knowing the right people, or through the contests. The contests can get expensive, though. I’ve heard screenwriters can make decent money selling their scripts, but very few of those scripts get greenlighted.
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Name an experience that changed you and influenced your writing.

Finding a small relatively unknown ezine back in 1999 called Plots With Guns. I was writing horror and sci-fi at the time, and doing poorly at it I might add. PWG catered to a genre called crime-noir I had never heard of before, but when I started reading the stories on PWG, I was like “Oh yeah, this shit is cool. I want to write like this.” So I started sending stories in to the editor, Anthony Neil Smith. It took a few tries. Neil wasn’t like most of the editors I had dealt with. He encouraged me to keep submitting, offering me some pointers, instead of the typical form rejections I was used to with the other editors. I eventually got a story published in PWG, which led to more stories. I found myself writing less horror and more crime. It seemed to me that my crime stories rang truer than my horror. I discovered I had another voice locked away, stronger, truer.
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What do you think the difference is between a cop and a soldier and how do you think society functions under military law?

I think a soldier protects the country as a whole from other countries and external threats, whereas a cop protects the citizenry from internal threats and maintains law and order. The decisions behind what is considered a threat is entirely political, on both sides. I think resorting to martial law is bad juju. It should always be a last resort after every attempt is made to resolve law and order on a local level through local law enforcement.
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Have you thought about writing a war story?

Like strictly a war story akin to memoirs of my time in the Army? I don’t know, probably not. There are so many more interesting stories out there than mine. Besides, most of the stuff I write turns out crap, with the occasional gem I feel proud bragging about. So I think I’d be hard-pressed to write something good, or even decent, along those lines. My service is up end of next year and I plan to get out and write full time for a while. Maybe that way I’ll churn out more gems than crap. But six years in the Army is still enough writing material to last me a life time. I know I will continue to incorporate those experiences into some of my stories, though not every story because I want to mix it up, be eclectic. At least, that’s how I feel about it right now. Who knows how I’ll feel down the road.
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Do you believe that character is destiny?

I would agree for the most part that character is destiny. Or perhaps a better word instead of character is personality. I think personality has a lot to do with how a person’s life plays out, how they choose to affect the world around them. For me, it all boils down to choice. The choices we make in life develop who we are, and the consequence of those choices shape the outcomes of life events. It is within our ability to change ourselves, no matter how far we sink to the bottom or rise to the top.
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Why do you think crime fiction is so popular?

I know it seems pretty popular among writers lately, but I’m not sure how popular it is among strictly readers. Seems to me most of the readers are also writers. I think it’s popular because you get to see unsavory characters do dirt; you get to see bad things happen and not feel bad about it. Most of us are regular law-abiding citizens who would never do any of this shit in real life, so we settle for the next best thing. I think that’s what attracts us to crime fiction the most and makes it so popular. When something is illegal, forbidden, taboo, people are drawn to it. Sure, we could go out and rob and murder if we wanted, but there are real consequences involved. With crime fiction, there are no consequences, outside of when it’s used as a scapegoat for the next Columbine.
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Do you have any plans to write a novel?

I’m in the process of writing one now, called “One-way Haiku.” I’m also working on a second novella titled “Zooman.” I plan to write more novels. Notice I say write, because getting them published and selling copies is a whole different ball game.
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That’s true, as I keep saying, there are many fine writers on the net who deserve to be in print. Maybe the world of publishing is starting to take note of this fact. Good luck with your novel. And thank you for giving a real and fascinating interview Jason.

He rose and shook my hand and I watched as he walked outside.  Some biker was pouring beer on his car because it was a BMW, and Jason put him in a rear naked choke. The biker gasped “Nice choke hold brother, I used to be in the Army.” Turned out most of the bikers at Iron Horse were ex-military. Jason let the biker go, came back inside and bought him a beer.